Category: C#

As documented in recent posts, I’ve been tinkering getting the LESS and CoffeeScript compilers running on Windows Script Host. I’ve now got round to wrapping these up as ASP.NET HTTP Handlers so you can easily use them in ASP.NET-based websites. You simply reference the *.less and *.coffee files and they get served up as CSS and JavaScript directly. For example:

No need to install add-ins into Visual Studio or add build steps to your project. The main downside is that it won’t run on non-Windows platforms under Mono (although I’m tempted adapt it to use Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey JavaScript Shell).

With the release of IronJS 0.2, the code below is the result of a 30-minute play I had this morning, which shows how easy it is to embed a fully .NET JavaScript runtime in your application by simply referencing IronJS.dll.

I tried to find some mechanism to get the current machine’s NetBIOS domain name (the machine domain, not user domain), but couldn’t find anything in the usual places (e.g. System.Environment). If you want the fancy-schmancy Active Directory DNS domain then you can use Domain.GetComputerDomain().Name from System.DirectoryServices.ActiveDirectory, or another one that I stumbled across in Reflector was IPGlobalProperties.GetIPGlobalProperties().DomainName that lives in System.Net.NetworkInformation. But a simple way of getting the old-skool NetBIOS/LanManager-style machine domain name proved elusive.

Some googling suggested that WMI would provide the answer but I find WMI a little heavyweight, and not always reliable. The information is also probably in the registry somewhere, although I couldn’t find it after a cursory scan. The proper, supported way it would appear is to use the Network Management API. So my solution entailed P/Invoking to netapi32.dll.

If you’re after the same information I hope you find the code below useful. Once you’ve incorporated this in your project, just call the GetMachineNetBiosDomain method. It will return the machine’s Workgroup name if the machine is not domain-joined.

Like most .NET developers, I used to do VB/VBA coding before C# came along. But, one thing I always missed in in the C# code editor was the lines that the VB editor puts between methods. An an avid user of CodeRush and Refactor! Pro, which itself does code structure painting in Visual Studio, I’ve created a DxCore Plugin that draws lines between methods which (IMHO) improves on the ones in the VB code editor.

Here’s a screen shot of it in action:

And here’s the exciting options page:

Even if you’re a VB.NET person you might like to try it to see if it works any better for you than VB’s built-in lines (although I guess you’d need to turn off the built-in method-separating lines somewhere in Tools Options).

The project is hosted on Rory Becker’s DX Core Community Plugins Google Code project, where you can download the source and binaries.

One the first issues that you have to deal with when writing unit tests is – where do I put the the tests? Here’s where I prefer to have them: as close to the code that’s being tested as possible, like so:

The tests class is hooked up to the original source file in the same way that ASP.NET code-behind files are, as a dependent project item.

You can do this by hacking the *csproj file directly using the <DependentUpon> tag, but to automate it I’ve written a Visual Studio macro (works in Visual Studio 2008, should work in Visual Studio 2005) that creates an appropriately-named tests class that can be invoked like so:

Having your ASP.NET error handling routine, which sends you emails when an error occurs on your site, itself fail is annoying. Especially when you think you’ve made the code robust enough. Anyway the error handler for one site I work on was failing with “ArgumentException: The specified string is not in the form required for a subject“.

So what is exactly “the form required for a subject”? Googling for this error message returns a lot of junk and misinformed forum posts. It turns out that setting the Subject on a System.Net.Mail.Message internally calls MailBnfHelper.HasCROrLF (thank you Reflector) which does exactly what it says on the tin. Therefore one forum poster’s solution of subject.Replace("rn", " ")isn’t going to work when your have either a carriage return or line feed in there.

So, obviously, the solution is:

message.Subject = subject.Replace('r', ' ').Replace('n', ' ');

Personally, I think that the MailMessage should to this for you or at least Microsoft should document what actually constitutes a “form required for a subject” in MSDN or, even better, in the actual error message itself!

As Brad Wilsonpoints out one of the nice features of C# 3.0’s extension methods is that they work on null instances. Indeed, why shouldn’t they? They’re just static methods that are invoked in a slightly different way. But this allows a subtle but very pleasing (to me this morning anyway) bit of syntactic sugar for the very commonly used String.IsNullOrEmpty() method.